IV Insights Blog

Posts from the
category

Seven years ago, Guillaume Chabot-Couture had just finished his Ph.D. at Stanford University. A native of Quebec City in Canada, Guillaume had studied physics as an undergrad at Université Laval in his hometown, and then high-temperature superconductors for his recently completed dissertation. His next move, though, was fairly wide open.

Hiking the West Coast Trail on Vancouver Island

“I was considering many of the usual routes at the end of a graduate degree,” he says: “working for a national laboratory, trying to get a postdoc in academia, or joining a large company. I was also looking at other areas, patent law and different ways to apply this knowledge.”

Through a bit of happenstance, says Guillaume, a friend reached out to him about a possible opportunity with Intellectual Ventures and its Epidemiological Modeling (EMOD) project, led by Philip Welkhoff. At the time, it was a small group of people inventing ways to build more realistic simulations of disease transmission, with a focus on improving and saving lives in developing countries using quantitative analysis. “When I had the opportunity to interview for this job, which combined analytics and mathematical modeling with a field that was largely unknown to me—communicable diseases, global health—I think my curiosity kicked in in a big way. I thought it sounded really interesting and wanted to learn more about it.”

Guillaume ended up getting the job, and EMOD has since grown about tenfold into what is now the Institute for Disease Modeling (IDM). As a senior research manager, he leads multiple teams working on building models of disease transmission and incidence, as well as other tools to help accelerate the eradication of infectious diseases in the developing world. “I think they took a chance hiring me, someone who didn’t know much about disease modeling, but it’s the best job I’ve ever had,” he says.

A New Field
IV often draws from varied, even unlikely, backgrounds to build research teams, as each new perspective can lead to unexpected insights and results. For Guillaume, after spending most of his student life studying physics, that meant trading superconductors for disease modeling. And that transition, while not exactly obvious, still very much triggered the same curiosity and potential for far-reaching impact that has always driven his work.

For years, Intellectual Ventures (IV) has built business on the back of new technologies: To date we’ve created 15 companies, which have raised more than $700 million in funding and created more than 400 jobs. With each company, we’ve learned how to work faster and smarter, and now we are accelerating this model by launching the Invention Science Fund (ISF) Incubator—a team within IV that matches outside entrepreneurs with our inventions and resources to disrupt big markets like health, telecommunications and transportation.

It’s a different approach to the incubator model. We have the inventions, the resources, and the know-how, and now we need passionate entrepreneurs who can execute.

Access to our state-of-the-art lab, our patent portfolio, and our network of engineers, mentors and investors means we can provide the tools for success—whether it’s a piece of special equipment from our mechanical engineering and instrument fabrication shop to create a prototype, or assistance setting up a business and navigating the legal landscape. We believe the best way to bring cutting-edge science and new technology to market is to put it in the hands of the most capable, passionate people, and provide the necessary resources to build a business.

And we’re not looking to build just any business, we invent for impact. Past IV spinouts like Evolv, Kymeta and Echodyne developed hardware solutions to transform their market, and we continue to believe hardware is the catalyst for fundamental change in big markets. The current pipeline of ISF Incubator spinouts is poised to do the same with breakthroughs in low-cost sensors, wireless power transmission, and biomedical devices.

So who are we looking for? We like ambitious entrepreneurs, fundable CEOs and market disruptors who have experience launching startups and leading successful companies. If this sounds like you, check out our available patents to learn more, and feel free to drop us a note.

March marks Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day celebrations around the world. At Intellectual Ventures, we commend the contributions of women to the field of invention, and work to support morewomen and girls to pursue careers in STEM. As IV President and COO Adriane Brown has aptly said:
“I believe that collaboration of great, diverse minds is how we will solve our world’s toughest challenges and create breakthrough technologies.”

Check out our top invention stories from March, from IV and spinout news to inventors and the grand challenges they’re addressing.

“When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”
- Alexander Graham Bell

Bell at the opening of the long-distance line from New York to Chicago in 1892 via Wikimedia Commons.

March marks the quick succession of two important anniversaries in the life of Alexander Graham Bell – his birthday (March 3) and the date he patented his groundbreaking telephone (March 7). And though we think of his invention as one that changed the course of history, success for Bell wasn’t always smooth. But while Bell encountered failure in his long career, it did not stop him from exploring new ideas.

Known as the father of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell’s invention historically changed how people communicated. In fact, Bell’s innovation completely disrupted the norm of communications. When he tried to sell the telephone patent to Western Union in the late-1800s, the company’s president scoffed at the idea, and thought of the telephone as only a toy. Furthermore, Bell’s other 16, non-communications-related patents are a testament to his general interest in inventive ideas across various activities.

Despite the multitude of invention success, Bell encountered failure as well. Many of his inventions, while ahead of their time, were not as successful as the telephone. Here are a couple of Bell’s invention ideas that did not work out as intended:

Early Metal Detector

This near-success occurred in 1881 after the assassination of then-President James A. Garfield. Bell, his assistant, Sumner Tainter, and mathematician Simon Newcomb developed a device that hummed when close to metal. During initial testing, the device succeeded and found bullets that the men placed under their clothing. However, while searching for the bullet in President Garfield’s body, the detector hummed continually.

Unfortunately, the bedsprings in President Garfield’s bed led to the continuous humming, and the invention was seemingly a complete failure. Nonetheless, Bell is credited with providing the framework for the modern metal detector.

Kite Flight

Later in life, Bell immersed himself in the study of flight. He supported aerospace engineering through the Aerial Experiment Association (AEA), and came up with concepts meant to progress the science of human flight. From 1907 through 1912 Bell primarily experimented with tetrahedral wings, or box-kites. However, many of his concepts could not stay aloft for long periods of time, and the Wright brothers became the first inventors to perfect extended flight.

Nevertheless, architect and artist, Tomás Saraceno, recently used Bell’s idea to create a tetrahedral wing that stays aloft in the air. This concept, according to Saraceno may one day lead to the development of floating solar-powered structures for energy production.

From Star Wars and Star Trek to James Bond and the Terminator, lasers have become a staple of the science fiction and action film worlds. But since their invention 57 years ago, the day-to-day use of lasers is no longer fantasy. Today, lasers find powerful and wide-ranging use in science, medicine, the military and now, even disease control.

Global Good’s Photonic Fence, or “insect-zapping laser” as described in a recent MIT Technology Review article, has extended the potential for lasers even further. Though originally developed to control vector-borne diseases like malaria, the technology is now being deployed to the agricultural battle ground of Florida to engage another potent pest. The enemy: an insect invader destroying the sunshine state’s oranges.

To get the inside scoop on the battle-ready weapon, we sat down with Photonic Fence technical project lead Arty Makagon to discuss how the technology works, how it’s progressed since its first generation and why it has the power to defeat the Asian citrus psyllid.

IV Insights: How far have you come since the first generation of the Photonic Fence?

Arty: We started with the question – can [the device] see far? We checked that off with our first-generation prototype. For Gen-2, we wanted to know - can we see targets both near and far? We started climbing the technology ladder. Now, with Gen-3, can we see near and far and kill and start hitting our performance benchmarks on controlling the pest we’re after.

We’ve also worked to understand and fine-tune the lethal mechanism so that when the bugs are killed, they don’t even look damaged. We have videos of earlier tests where you can see via high-speed camera that we burned the wings off mosquitos. That’s neat to watch, but it turns out that it’s gratuitous overkill – and so that isn’t how the machine works now. After we shoot a bug, when we look at it under a microscope, we can’t tell where it was shot – there are no singe marks and no gaping wounds.

So how did the bug die? We sent samples to the University of Washington histology lab and found out that essentially we end up cooking the bug. Our laser acts like a very precise, “short-wavelength microwave oven”. When you look at a cross-section of a chicken breast cooked in a microwave and a cross section of a bug dosed with a laser, they essentially look the same.

What’s the big deal about the Asian citrus psyllid?

The psyllid is a problem that’s screaming for a solution. Since its high 15 years ago, there’s been a 60 percent reduction in total citrus production in Florida. You may not have noticed, but the makeup of your carton of orange juice has been changing over the years as the varieties of oranges that are best suited to juice production are dying off.

The Asian citrus psyllid is also particularly insidious because it spreads a virus and can infect an entire tree rather than ruining individual pieces of fruit like other pests. Because the psyllid is so destructive, farmers have been trying all kinds of creative methods to control the pest. They’ve deployed everything from parasite wasps that eat the early stage psyllids to planting sacrificial species – like guava – that the psyllids appeared to prefer. But despite these efforts, there are bunch of now-derelict groves in Florida that are just so infested that they can’t be used.

Other citrus growing states are on the cusp of having a big psyllid problem, but there’s nothing they can do about it. Lots of places are spending a lot of money on trying to prevent the psyllid, but with very little success. The psyllid and the virus they spread are both in Texas and California. Growers are trying to monitor how the psyllids are spreading, but even those mechanisms aren’t terribly effective.

In short, we’re working in this area because this is not a Florida problem or even a U.S. problem – the Asian citrus psyllid is a global problem. And no one has found a solution to this problem, short of “run away and plant in regions less hospitable to psyllids.”

How do people react when they see the Photonic Fence in action?

I think the best way to describe it for first-time viewers is disbelief.

We do two kinds of demonstrations at the IV Lab with the Photonic Fence – a tracking demo and a lethal demo – and both can be kind of dumbfounding in different ways. For the tracking demo, you can watch a screen that shows what’s happening in real time for a box of bugs that’s 60 meters away. It takes a minute for the brain to process that the machine is seeing something that would be effectively impossible to see with the human eye.

For the lethal demo, you start with a box of 25 mosquitos and within a few seconds, there are 25 mosquito corpses on the floor of the box. This also takes a minute to register, because you can’t see anything except for mosquitos falling to the ground because the laser in our system is outside of the visible range.

As a new Congress descends on DC, the push for changes to our patent system continues. In February, despite already historic changes to the system over the past few years, Senate leaders called for more tweaks. With a new administration in town it’s a good time to review the bidding.

Let’s start with some basic facts: Patents are more than arcane legal documents; they represent a legal claim to rights in an invention. Regardless of whether you subscribe to the “patents as property” or “patents as defining a liability” theory, there is no dispute that patents are an asset – they can be bought, sold, licensed or otherwise transferred.

This fact is fundamental to the functioning of the patent system, and the notion that inventions are valuable and are worthy of investment is the core operating principle of Intellectual Ventures. This was true when my co-founder Nathan wrote a Harvard Business Review piece on the topic nearly a decade ago, and it is true today.

Over the years others have adopted IV’s principle and, as a result, a market grew up around these investments. One would think that this would be viewed as a good thing – if we agree that inventing is something to be incentivized, then a market for investing in inventions will provide additional incentives for those doing the invention and, ultimately, fund more invention.

Unfortunately, not all saw the growing market for invention rights as a positive development. Market leaders were quite happy with the status quo in which inventors had limited ability to seek recourse when their inventions were used. As the market developed, and the playing field was leveled, the market leaders developed a strategy familiar to the new administration – they developed a set of alternative facts to push the idea that the system was failing.

For example, there was much hue and cry over the alleged use of mass mailing of demand letters to end users of products alleging infringement. After extensive analysis (and expenditure of tax dollars) the FTC reached a settlement with the one (1) actual offender, who had extracted licenses from exactly two (2) small businesses.

Over the past decade these rhetorical attacks on invention rights have been endless. Common refrains include: Patent litigation is out of control! Poor quality patents are killing investment in technology and dragging down companies! Demand letters are defrauding businesses! Software shouldn’t be patentable! Trolls are abusing the International Trade Commission!

This assault on the system lead to the passage of the America Invents Act, and a further bevy of changes including several Supreme Court rulings: two encouraging judges to award attorney’s fees to the winner in patent cases, another which muddied the waters when it comes to what is even deserving of a patent, and a third that could reshape where a patent owner can assert his rights.

In 2002, Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space said, “The difference between science and the arts is not that they are different sides of the same coin… they are manifestations of the same thing. The art and sciences are avatars of human creativity.”

So this month, the links we love tell tales of artists both within and outside the walls of IV who, like Jemison, use the power of thought as their paintbrush – leaving their mark through inventions that improve our world.

Stephen Hawking once remarked, “We are all now connected by the internet, like neurons in a giant brain.”

Image courtesy of Kymeta

Technology has enabled us to achieve a higher level of global interconnectivity than ever before. Yet even in our modern world of smartphones and wireless internet, there are still loose ends – those places around the world where connectivity is still limited. Kymeta, an IV spinout, is working to change this by delivering on what connectivity is meant to be – secure, available, universal and global. Harnessing the power of metamaterials, Kymeta is creating high-speed, global connectivity that can be easily accessed on land, out to sea, or high in the sky.

Since our last post about Kymeta’s mTenna™ technology, the company has made major moves worth sharing. Its innovation over the last several months have propelled it one step closer to delivering accessibility from the furthest corners of the Earth, including today's announcement that its 20 cm mTenna™ successfully connected to the Intelsat S.A. satellite constellation.

Congratulations to Kymeta for being named to Fast Company’s top-10 most innovative companies in space earlier this month. “Anyone whose DIRECTV has dropped out during a flight will appreciate Kymeta’s flat-panel antennas, which use electronic steering to connect with low and medium earth orbit satellites and provide broadband speeds for fast-moving vehicles. Train commuters would no longer have to rely on cellular towers and cargo ships would gain access to improved navigation features. Even your car could get better connectivity,” said Fast Company on the impact of Kymeta’s technology.

This month, Kymeta announced plans to work with Aurum Security GmbH to bring Kymeta mTenna™ satellite connectivity to VIP and civilian armored vehicles (CAV). This means high bandwidth connectivity can be accessed by VIPs, government officials and royalty no matter where they are in the world.

On World Cancer Day, Global Good and QuantuMDx have announced a new partnership to develop a rapid, low-cost and mobile diagnostic test that could make a tremendous difference in the global fight against cervical cancer.

Source: Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon

Cervical cancer is almost entirely preventable, yet it kills nearly 270,000 women worldwide every year. Yet, as deaths from the slow-growing disease drop in the U.S., women in the developing world are dying at an unprecedented rate. That’s because many of these women who have human papillomavirus (HPV) – the leading cause of cervical cancer – don’t return to health facilities to receive follow up care. A point-of-care HPV test that provides health workers with immediate results, allowing them to screen and treat women during a single visit, is critical.

Enter QuantuMDx and Global Good, working together to harness the wide-ranging benefits of QuantuMDx’s technology platform including the speed, accessibility and affordability of its battery-operated portable Q-POC™ diagnostic laboratory along with the global health expertise of Global Good, to make gold standard HPV testing accessible to women worldwide.

Renowned professor and biologist Uri Alon once said, “In order to discover something truly new, at least one of your basic assumptions has to change.” This creative and outside-the-box thinking that scientific discovery demands is not an easy feat to achieve. It requires us to abandon a preconceived notion and embrace a new framework for looking at a problem.

From clean energy and virtual reality to artificial intelligence and American football, as we wrap up the first month of the new year, the stories we’re loving exemplify this spirit of challenging basic assumptions to solve the world’s biggest problems.

IV discoveries in the news:

On Nova PBS this month, Nathan Myhrvold shared his views on the future of global energy demand and how to innovate the next generation of nuclear power.